End the Drug War: Save $88 Billion

Sate and federal governments in the United States face massive looming fiscal deficits. One policy change that can reduce deficits is ending the drug war. Legalization means reduced expenditure on enforcement and an increase in tax revenue from legalized sales. This report estimates that legalizing drugs would save roughly $41.3 billion per year in government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition. Of these savings, $25.7 billion would accrue to state and local governments, while $15.6 billion would accrue to the federal government.

Approximately $8.7 billion of the savings would result from legalization of marijuana and $32.6 billion from legalization of other drugs.The report also estimates that drug legalization would yield tax revenue of $46.7 billion annually, assuming legal drugs were taxed at rates comparable to those on alcohol and tobacco. Approximately $8.7 billion of this revenue would result from legalization of marijuana and $38.0 billion from legalization of other drugs.

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Jeffrey Miron and NYU graduate student Katherine Waldock estimate that ending the war on drugs would save more than $40 billion a year in enforcement costs (about $16 billion federal, $26 billion state and local) while allowing collection of some $47 billion a year in new tax revenue. Although marijuana is by far the most popular illegal drug and accounts for half of all drug arrests, Miron and Waldock calculate that legalizing it would yield just one-fifth of the $88 billion in total savings and revenue...

Miron and Waldock's paper considers only the budgetary impact of repealing drug prohibition. Many other costs of the war on drugs—including the basic loss of control over one's body and brain, the erosion of Fourth Amendment rights and other civil liberties, interference with religious rituals and medical practice, black market violence, official corruption, lives disrupted by arrest and incarceration, terrorism subsidized by drug profits, and deaths and injuries from tainted or unexpectedly strong drugs—are not so easily expressed in dollars.

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Prohibition Does Not Work

John Stossel: End the Drug War

I understand that people on drugs can do terrible harm — wreck lives and hurt people. But that's true for alcohol, too. But alcohol prohibition didn't work. It created Al Capone and organized crime. Now drug prohibition funds nasty Mexican gangs and the Taliban. Is it worth it? I don't think so.

Everything can be abused, but that doesn't mean government can stop it, or should try to stop it. Government goes astray when it tries to protect us from ourselves.

Many people fear that if drugs were legal, there would be much more use and abuse. That's possible, but there is little evidence to support that assumption.

In the Netherlands, marijuana has been legal for years. Yet the Dutch are actually less likely to smoke than Americans. Thirty-eight percent of American adolescents have smoked pot, while only 20 percent of Dutch teens have. One Dutch official told me that "we've succeeded in making pot boring."

By contrast, what good has the drug war done? It's been 40 years since Richard Nixon declared war on drugs. Since then, government has spent billions and officials keep announcing their "successes." They are always holding press conferences showing off big drug busts. So it's not like authorities aren't trying.

We've locked up 2.3 million people, a higher percentage than any other country. That allows China to criticize America's human-rights record because our prisons are "packed with inmates."

Yet drugs are still everywhere. The war on drugs wrecks far more lives than drugs do!

Need more proof? Fox News runs stories about Mexican cocaine cartels and marijuana gangs that smuggle drugs into Arizona. Few stop to think that legalization would end the violence. There are no Corona beer smugglers. Beer sellers don't smuggle. They simply ship their product. Drug laws cause drug crime...

Economist Ludwig von Mises wrote:
"(O)nce the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness ... (w)hy not prevent him from reading bad books and bad plays ... ? The mischief done by bad ideologies is more pernicious ... than that done by narcotic drugs."

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